Are you a picky gamer?

I was recently at a friend’s and the topic of Epic Mickey came up. Because I hadn’t played the game at the time, I asked if he had found Epic Mickey to be as troublesome as some reviews had suggested.

My friend said the camera could be trouble at times, but otherwise the game in general was more fun than not. He then compared the game (and pretty much videogames in general) to watching movies, in that there’s no such thing as a perfect movie. No movie is so perfect that it can appeal to every moviegoer through every dialogue of every scene. In every movie, there’ll be some lighting that could’ve been improved or pacing to be altered so the story can be told in a more effective way.The problem is that while movies last around 2 hours, videogames often last much, much longer. It’d be like watching all six seasons of Lost in a single sittle. At some point, there’ll be a scene where I’d go “Seriously? Bai Ling? Really?”

Yet time after time, there were games where I stopped playing because I couldn’t get over specific details that other players wouldn’t even notice. Things like the simlish-like language in Okami, or the fact that I couldn’t sort by type in Fallout‘s Pip-boy 3000. I stopped playing those games because of one minuscule aspect in spite of what the rest of the game had to offer. And these two games each had massive worlds and engrossing storylines, yet I just couldn’t get passed the one tiny detail.

Was I just being too picky? I never saw it that way until my friend used the game-movie analogy. At the same time why are there games that I’m so absolutely in love with (eg: Kirby’s Epic Yarn, Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves just to name a few) in that I could instinctively ignore any shortcomings these games may have?

For example, I could handle Resident Evil‘s ribbon-dependent save system, yet I couldn’t care for the save system in Dead Rising 2. I could deal with the original Assassin’s Creed‘s repetitiveness, yet I couldn’t manage the repetitiveness in Infamous.

As I’m playing my friend’s copy of Epic Mickey, little issues are already starting to bother me enough to contemplate quitting. I haven’t decided on what I’ll end up doing, but before I let one more game slip through my snobby-gaming fingers I do wonder what exactly are my deciding factors between issues I can tolerate and dismiss?

What about you? Are you a picky gamer? What are your pet peeves in videogames and do you know how to bypass them? Or do you just let it fall by the way side?